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Politics : Sharks in the Septic Tank
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To: epicure who wrote (30322)9/30/2001 10:53:54 AM
From: Tom Clarke  Read Replies (1) of 82486
 
An excerpt from a review of Jeffrey Hart's book Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe.

What is the goal of human life? Athens says knowledge, Jerusalem holy or moral rectitude. It is a central part of Mr. Hart's purpose to show that the resilience of the Western tradition lies in its unwillingness to choose one of these exclusively. "The mind of the West," he writes, "was born amid tension and contradiction and draws strength from refusing to be either-or but rather both-and." .....the particular genius of the Western tradition has been its capaciousness, what Mr. Hart calls its 'dialectical' appetite. As he observes, the dominant Islamic tradition, in contrast, evolved a tradition of compartmentalized truths."

.....The point is that plurality is inscribed at the center of the West. "We have Augustine's "Confessions' but we also have Voltaire's 'Candide.' There is Dante, but also Montaigne...The Western mind...embodies an argument at the core of its being.

It is that fact above all, we may speculate, that enrages the terrorists. They may denounce US cultural imperialism or the Christendom of the West. But at bottom it is our intellectual and moral suppleness that they cannot abide. The West has taught the world to say Yes to the complexity of experience. Its respect for individual liberty is in part an acknowledgment of such complexity. Terrorism seeks to deny that affirmation through intimidation and slaughter....
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